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Apropos of Nothing
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About This Book
The Long-Awaited, Enormously Entertaining Memoir by One of the Great Artists of Our Time—Now a New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, and Publisher's Weekly Bestseller. In this candid and often hilarious memoir, the celebrated director, comedian, writer, and actor offers a comprehensive, personal look at his tumultuous life. Beginning with his Brooklyn childhood and his stint as a writer for the Sid Caesar variety show in the early days of television, working alongside comedy greats, Allen tells of his difficult early days doing standup before he achieved recognition and success. With his unique storytelling pizzazz, he recounts his departure into moviemaking, with such slapstick comedies as Take the Money and Run, and revisits his entire, sixty-year-long, and enormously productive career as a writer and director, from his classics Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Hannah and Her Sisters to his most recent films, including Midnight in Paris. Along the way, he discusses his marriages, his romances and famous friendships, his jazz playing, and his books and plays. We learn about his demons, his mistakes, his successes, and those he loved, worked with, and learned from in equal measure. This is a hugely entertaining, deeply honest, rich and brilliant self-portrait of a celebrated artist who is ranked among the greatest filmmakers of our time.
Reviews
"a long, nearly 400-page, disjointed ramble intended primarily for boomers who will recognize Allen's name-dropping of celebrities whose paths he's crossed since the mid-20th century."
"This is a horrible, painful and, above all, highly opaque story, and it always will be – up to, and including, the day it is inevitably mentioned in the first paragraph of a long newspaper obituary."
"I do not know whether the more salacious disclosures—such as that Ronan 'had his legs broken a few times and reconstructed to lengthen them' to gain the advantage of height that might serve him in a future political career—have been subjected to legal review ..."
"It's hard to reconcile how a man with enough romance to make enough heart to make The Purple Rose of Cairo, enough humor to make Bananas and enough psychological insight to make Crimes and Misdemeanors can show so little of those same qualities in the pages of this book."
"The accusation that in 1992 he molested his adopted daughter, the 7-year-old Dylan Farrow, is a charge of another magnitude."
"his comic defences are his consistent and, in their way, thoroughly sincere response to a world he has countered for so long and so staggeringly successfully with his wit."
"Every technician is a genius ..."
"The first third of the book is a romp, but when Allen finally works his way up to Mia Farrow, out comes the heavy artillery ..."
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